SOHO Turns 25
hubie wrote in with a story which became:
SOHO's Pioneering 25 years in Orbit:
The ESA-NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is celebrating its twenty-fifth launch anniversary.
Two and a half decades of scientific discovery is a major milestone for any space mission. But when the spacecraft at the heart of the celebration was only designed to last for two years, and operates from an area outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere, it's an unalloyed triumph in the history of space exploration.
SOHO launched on 2 December 1995. It is stationed 1.5 million kilometers closer to the Sun than the Earth, from where it enjoys uninterrupted views of our star. The mission was launched with three scientific objectives in mind. The first was to study the dynamics and structure of the solar interior. The second was to study why the Sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona, is so much hotter than its surface, and the third was to study where and how the solar wind of particles is accelerated. Almost 6000 papers have now appeared in refereed journals based on SOHO data, many of them representing significant progress in our understanding of the original objectives. In addition to investigating how the Sun works, SOHO is the most prolific discoverer of comets in astronomical history, having spotted more than 4000 of these icy mini-worlds during the sunward leg of their journeys.
[*] SOHO.
In celebration, NASA posted a really cool video from the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) instrument showing a movie of its observations of the Sun over the whole mission.
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